All eleven tracks on Bad Timing are gems that balance a knack for brain-lodging choruses with the grime and stylistic drift of Exile on Main Street, begging a record collection's worth of comparisons with nary an instance of outright thievery.

They've still got angst to spare, but their wit has been ground down by 'maturity,' or whatever you want to call it, into a bitter thing that saps a lot of that reckless energy.

The songs, interludes, pacing and sequencing are all as they should be, helping to make Quicksand/Cradlesnakes Califone's best record.

Though Mull Historical Society is an act one could easily file under "pleasant-enough pop," at 13 tracks (plus a bonus disc!), MacIntyre's strictly 80bpm velvet-lined melancholia will test the patience of any Anglophile.

In short, if your favorite bands aren't played between Audioslave and Foo Fighters on modern rock radio, Cave In probably isn't one of them.

Burn, Piano Island, Burn balances so perfectly between commercial appeal and untainted creativity that it's as if the band have been digitally inserted atop a mountain no man could conceivably climb.

Like The Clash before them, The Libertines draw primarily from decades of rock tradition-- blues, dub, a healthy whiff of the English countryside, and a few gorgeous rock riffs straight from the brainstem of Chuck Berry-- and fuse them into an unruly and triumphant monster of an album.

Skimskitta isn't particularly strong or potent, but it's relaxed and smooth enough to induce a very mellow, mild buzz.

With a bloated 60+ minute runtime and some truly misguided dabblings with e-bows and saxophones, Log 22 presents Bettie Serveert at their most self-indulgent. And it's not pretty.

It's an unrefined, poorly calculated mess.

Awful as it might be, Oskar is not easy to dismiss because awfulness has always been a part of Momus' gambit.

Diamonds on the Inside's breathless Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock whirlwind is tiring, at best.

Beans twirls and stretches his language, depicting the life of a poet-rapper, heavy on non-traditional boasts and battle rhymes. But he lacks the gulping, deep tone of former APC cohorts Priest and Sayyid, which means the beats usually usurp his rhymes.

The band's new sound is nothing short of painfully, achingly banal.

Her voice, raspy and harsh against the gently ringing acoustic guitar, makes you expect a gloomy, even maudlin disc. But that can distract from what makes it great: its ambiguity, the way she expresses herself in such strangely personal terms yet never settles on an emotional tone.

The songs are frustratingly stagnant-- albeit beautiful-- exercises in lap-pop textures.

Wonderful Rainbow delivers what Ride the Skies most lacked: Musical diversity.

Fans of the mid-1970s lineup should find the most to enjoy on Power to Believe, as it not only finds King Crimson playing with muscular aggression similar to that period, but also revisiting the group improvisation that set them so far apart from other 70s prog bands.

It takes a colossal effort to back Molina's candor, and given what a departure this record is for the band, it's not surprising that some of the songs get bogged down here and there. It's also not much of a problem.

Throwing Muses are the counterpart-- or maybe the antidote-- to the driven, enraptured solitude of [Hersh's] solo material; they deliver a release and an excitement that's been missing from her work for years.

Unfortunately, the album is too top-heavy to be seaworthy, the back end full of Fugazi knockoffs and half a song stretched out to ten minutes in a forced attempt at a showstopping finale.

There's definitely a lot to like throughout this disc; the band has boatloads of talent, and the eclectic spread gels much better than you'd expect.

Down with Wilco shouldn't be purchased simply on the desire to hear new Wilco material, but would almost certainly appeal to fans of the Summerteeth era.

#1 is a mixture of sounds already available on many Human League, 808 State and Heaven 17 records, arranged by amateurs exploring their self-obsessed, nerdy sexuality.

Hiding below layers of dated synth noise, dinky drum machines and expensive effects is, surprise surprise, a solo bedroom recording. 50 minutes of structured wankery, as performed by a lone Brit with the questionable talent to put a chorus to a verse, employing a thin, laddish vocal and rudimentary guitar skills.

A decade into their career, the Notwist have created a masterpiece by pulling the same trick they pulled on Shrink: mixing things that might not seem to fit together into a beautiful, seamless whole.

Sounds overproduced and underdeveloped.

The musical arrangements are just right, consisting of his usual assortment of electronic instruments and percussion that sound like broken toys. Hearing these tools applied in the service of well-written pop songs would be divine, but the melodies, as performed by the speech synthesizer, just aren't moving.